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Author:
Sheila Benson
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Sheila Benson was the principal Los Angeles Times film critic from 1981-91, following which she was their Critic At Large, writing on all aspects of the cultural life of that city. She also has written for Cinemania/msn.com for which she was chief film critic and many other papers.
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If critics can be said to have favorites -- and they have -- early on Sheila was a particular champion of independent films, as they were finding their voice and their power. As a result, her reports from the earliest days of Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the Sundance festivals found their way into what was then the "Industry"-centric Times.
Moving online, she was chief film critic for Microsoft's invaluable Cinemania from its birth to its death, 4 ½ years later. She has also contributed coverage, essays and interviews to Interview, Elle, Premiere, Film Comment, Variety, the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Weekly, London Telegraph's Weekend magazine, Canada's Globe and Mail American Film Magazine and the New York Times.
Affiliated with the National Society of Film Critics, FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981-95), she has taught Critical Writing at UCLA and has been a jury member at the film festivals of Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hawaii, Manila, Seattle, Aspen, Sundance/Park City, Taos, Banff and Palm Springs. In 1987, she was given the Vesta Award for Journalism for her contribution to the arts in Southern California. She wrote the narration for Chuck Workman's "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Film" for Bravo, and in 2004 wrote the critical essay for the DVD of Horton Foote's Tomorrow for Home Vision Entertainment.
Having moved to Washington in 1996, she now reviews for the Seattle Weekly.
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"Men Don't Leave"
Ever been so wretched that you ate Spaghetti-Os (c.q.) cold from a can? That the "clean" unsorted laundry piled up until it threatened to overrun the place? That's major depression, and the wonder is that its numbing realities could be part of a movie with the surprise and the elation of "Men Don't Leave"(selected theaters). The year's first tonic, it's a tender, beautifully acted, diabolically droll film on the subject of love, loss and the sheer blissful unpredictability of life.
It's that complete unpredictability that hold the movie's charm--not its subject matter, which is moving but far from ground-breaking. It's the "what-if" nightmare familiar to every neurotic worthy of the name: "What would I do if I lost you?" Renovating their comfortable house in the suburbs of Baltimore, the Macauleys, John (Tom Mason) and Beth (Jessica Lange) and their sons, teenage Chris (Chris O'Donnell) and 9-year old Matt (Charlie Korsmo) are a close-knit, cheerfully ordinary family until tragedy hits.
It's what director Paul Brickman, who wrote and directed "Risky Business," and his co-writer, Barbara Benedek, ("The Big Chill"), do with this unsurprising material that gives the film its kick. "Men Don't Leave" has probably the highest concentration of grand and endearingly off-beat characters since "The Accidental Tourist." They include Joan Cusack as a preternaturally self-assured hospital X-ray technician; Kathy Bates as the Baltimore gourmet shop owner who finally employs the widowed Lange and Arliss Howard as a witty, laconic composer whose music is scored for full orchestra, typewriters and pedal steel. The secret, of course, is that none of the three consider themselves off-beat; they simply go about their lives at an oblique angle to the rest of the functioning world.
Lange's first months on her own with her boys are an add-a-pearl of adjustments: the crackerbox Baltimore apartment that takes the place of their own over mortgaged, underinsured house; Lange's desperately overbright job interviews and the boys' unexpected choices of new friends in the big city. For O'Donnell it's Cusack, an "older woman" in their apartment building; for Korsmo it's a friendly fellow Fourth grader who uses a switchblade to divide his Milk Duds and whose after-school activities would give his parents' nightmares, if they ever suspected them.
The screenplay is most perceptive as it suggests the cracks that can appear in even a closely-knit family as the harassed Lange tries to cope with her 17-year old's playing man of the house--her house and Cusack's; with her 9-year old's poignant search for an ideal family and her own growing depression as she tries to keep every base covered at once.
The same script may strain our good will a bit with Arliss Howard's deadpan Charles Simon, who seems to have every virtue including being unattached, a recent development in his life. This patient, funny guy is a dream prince on the order of Alan Bates's character in "An Unmarried Woman." He seems to have no visible flaws and his weapons against
Beth's sadness include a raucous night at a polka hall, "where everybody's fatter than you and there's no shame." There's a lusty, measurable attraction between Beth and Charlie, each a recovering soul, but the plain truth of the matter is that he's on the scene too soon in Beth's mourning process.
Beth Macauley emerges as a portrayal of understanding, complexity and enormously subtle shadings; it may be Lange's best since "Tootsie." It's nice, too, to have an outlet for Lange's humor again. It rips out in physical moments like her hilarious polka hall scene, or in her vocal outrage when the professionally soothing Cusack marches in to take a hand in Lange's clinical depression.
"Men Don't Leave" doesn't depend on Lange's virtuosity alone; it's ensemble stuff in the hands of an uncommonly sensitive and inventive director. Its most poignant scene goes to Chris O'Donnell, pleading his mother's case with Howard. Brickman wisely keeps his camera on the boy's agonized face and lets the scene run until it cracks the heart.
In among these adult pros--including a Cusack at the very top of her form and a hell-for-leather character for Kathy Bates--what Brickman has gotten from these two young debuting actors is stunning. O'Donnell is sensitive, funny and furious by turns, and the younger son, Korsmo, seems a sure bet to take over from the gifted Lukas Haas as that actor grows into older roles.
Every single technical credit is fine: Bruce Surtees moody, evocative lighting camerawork; Richard Chew's impeccable editing, Susan Becker's deliberately unchic clothes for Lange, the production design of Barbara Ling and Curt Frisk's sound recording, which turns the noise of that X-ray buckling in O'Donnell's hand as he prepares to meet adulthood, into witty aural punctuation.
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